arXiv:2606. 18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users.
By Itamar Pres, Laura Ruis, Melat Ghebreselassie, Belinda Z. Li, Jacob Andreas
arXiv:2606. 28615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought and post-hoc rationales are used to justify model outputs.
By Nhi Nguyen, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath
arXiv:2608. 16627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language explanations (NLEs) are increasingly used as inputs, for example, as few-shot rationales that influence model behavior in in-context learning (ICL).
By Mahdi Dhaini, Adam Dejl, Juraj Vladika, Volkan \"Ozer, Barbara Plank, Gjergji Kasneci
The paper investigates counterfactual self‑explanations in large language models, where a model edits an input minimally to change its own prediction. Experiments on sentiment analysis and natural language inference with ten instruction‑tuned models from the LLaMA‑3 and Qwen‑2.5 families show that larger models produce more faithful, minimal, and human‑aligned counterfactuals. While rationale‑guided prompts improve minimality and alignment, they do not consistently enhance faithfulness, indicating that explanation quality depends heavily on model capacity and requires empirical validation.
By Giannis Kalyvas, Giorgos Filandrianos, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Vassilis Lyberatos, Giorgos Stamou
The paper proposes a test‑time method to enhance the faithfulness of large language model (LLM) explanations by removing concepts not credited in the model’s explanation before re‑querying the model. This approach targets incompleteness—omissions of influential factors—rather than unsoundness, and is model‑agnostic, requiring no changes to model weights. Experiments across two datasets and multiple model families show improved faithfulness compared to standard prompting and faithfulness‑encouraging prompts.
By Qinglan Luo, S M A Nahian, John Guttag, S. Mazdak Abulnaga, Katie Matton
Co‑RL is a multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework that trains several decoupled models without shared parameters, using rewards generated by their peers. By increasing cohort diversity—through heterogeneous model families, varying sizes, and rephrased training samples—Co‑RL reduces self‑reinforcing feedback loops, preserves behavioral diversity, and prevents training collapse. Across both text‑only and multimodal benchmarks, Co‑RL outperforms base models and prior label‑free methods, achieving gains of 3.0‑8.6% on seven text benchmarks and 2.3‑7.2% on four multimodal benchmarks, while matching or surpassing supervised approaches without any ground‑truth labels.
By Yunhao Yang, Yuexin Bian, Yunjie Tian, Di Fu, Tianjin Huang, Yuanyuan Shi, Ziang Xiao, Nuno Vasconcelos, Yijiang Li